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Hey Folks!

I wanted to 🙏 for signing up to the Cognitive UxD. Our community is growing at a rate of knots and I’m super happy that you think UX and Cognitive Psychology are important topics. I’m excited that you find this resource useful but I would love to make it even better. So if you have any suggestions or feedback, please drop me an email.

Norbi Gaal

Psychology in UX

On an average day we experience a wide range of emotions, such as disappointment when we have to get up early, happiness when we see our loved ones, anger when the train we are travelling on stops without forewarning, or frustration when we struggle to open a jar. In the same way emotions arise as we navigate and interact with our environment, these emotions are evoked when navigating and interacting with technologies. While some emotions are less common, like sadness and empathic concern, many products induce a wide range of emotional responses. Some of these emotions are an unintended by-product of certain design qualities, whilst other emotional responses are the result of careful planning to improve the user experience associated with a particular product.

When Snapchat first launched, critics discounted the photo-messaging app as a fad – a toy for sexting and selfies. Their judgements were reasonable. It’s impossible to predict the success of a product on day one, let alone its ability to change user behavior. But hindsight is beginning to prove critics wrong. Snapchat boasts 5 million daily active users sending 200 million photos and videos daily. That’s an average of 40 snaps a day per user! But why are users so engaged to Snapchat? After all, what real need is Snapchat solving anyway?

If I ever make a list of the most important things to learn, I’d put “human behavior” very, very close to the top. Others have made such lists. Take Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner:
“The elementary part of psychology — the psychology of misjudgment, as I call it — is a terribly important thing to learn. There are about 20 little principles. And they interact, so it gets slightly complicated. But the guts of it is unbelievably important. Terribly smart people make totally bonkers mistakes by failing to pay heed to it. In fact, I’ve done it several times during the last two or three years in a very important way. You never get totally over making silly mistakes.”

Accessibility

Accessibility has been a buzz word in the design community lately. What does it mean? “The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability” — Henry & McGee, W3C.
There are two de facto standards for accessibility: Section 508, which applies to the public sector, and WCAG 2.0, which applies to the private sector. These two standards are essentially checklists that are used to evaluate websites. Section 508 is a legal mandate, while WCAG 2.0 is not. So, unless you are a government employee or subcontractor, you are not legally required to make your website accessible. But, there are countless reasons to care about accessibility! Each of your users should be entitled to an equal experience.

Human Cognition

Replacing the Home button with a swipe gesture creates some UX difficulties, but they are likely to be overcome by the benefit of a larger screen. Ten years ago, the first iPhone started the mobile revolution. In 2009, when we released the first edition of our mobile-usability report, we still had to convince companies that they need a mobile presence. As we release the fourth edition of the same report, the mobile landscape has changed significantly: today it offers not only more diversity but also, not surprisingly, better, more consistently good user experience.
One of the biggest hurdles in mobile design is the small screen: because only so much can fit in, essential information gets hidden under the fold, navigation elements are crowded under hamburger menus, and users struggle to find what they need fast. Every extra bit of screen real estate can make a difference on mobile.

When conducting user research and testings, are you aware that cognitive biases can occur to both ourselves and the users? These biases threaten the validity of the research, making research insights less applicable. A cognitive bias refers to a systematic illogical thinking pattern that affects judgments and decisions. These biases allow us to make decisions quicker and easier, but sometimes it also hinders us from generating accurate judgment. In this article, I have listed out 6 common biases that you may encounter during user research and approaches you can take to avoid them.

Design for safety is key for aeronautic industry, since the product concept to the operation strategy. The more we advance in automation technology, more advantage we have been taking from it in order to design systems proof of pilots errors. However, to make it even safer, we have to understand better what we should automate and what we should keep on human pilot accountability Redundancy is one of the ways for develop error resistant design, every important system have a backup (sometime backups) operation alternatives. It’s is also true for human actions, that’s why we have this pilot plus co-pilot operation. In the past we had 5 humans operating a cockpit, as automation increases, less people was needed, and today there are a lot of functions operating automated in the aircraft. Automation is being very positive in aviation story, the fatalities reduced as the systems became more automated. However, if we analyse the accidents that keep happen, a great part of root causes are classified as “human error”, once it was caused by a pilot’s misconception on what interfaces were reporting or which system he should activate. Actually it was a human-machine interface issue!